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Garry Phillipson
University of Wales, Lampeter

The Philosophy of William James as a Context for Astrology

According to William James reality is “if not irrational, then at least non-rational in its constitution”.1What he meant can be illustrated by a marginal note he added to a lecture: “All ‘classic’, ‘clean’, cut and dried, ‘noble’, ‘fixed’, ‘eternal’ Weltanschauungen [worldviews] seem to me to violate the character with which life concretely comes and the expression which it bears, of being, or at least involving a muddle and a struggle, with an ‘ever not quite’ to all our formulas, and novelty and possibility forever leaking in.”2 This talk will consider reason, reality, and the disjunction alleged by James to exist between them. Some key elements of James’ thought – such as pluralism, radical empiricism and pragmatism – will be touched on, together with parallels from other thinkers. After noting that astrology is often dismissed as lacking rationality,3 consideration will be given to James’ non-rational reality as a context for the understanding and practice of astrology.

Garry Phillipson is a student of astrology, Buddhism and Advaita.  He is a tutor on the MA in Cultutral Astronomy and Astrology at the University of Wales, Lampeter, where he is working on a PhD looking at theories of truth as they apply to astrology.


William James, ‘Lecture V: The Compounding of Consciousness’ in A Pluralistic Universe [William James: Writings 1902 – 10 (New York: Library of America, 1988) p.726.]

William James, Manuscript Lectures (Harvard University Press, 1988), p.326.

E.g. in Edward W. James’ essay ‘On Dismissing Astrology and Other Irrationalities’ in Patrick Grim (ed.), Philosophy of Science and the Occult (2nd ed.) (State University of New York Press, 1990), pp.28 – 36.